2017/09/30 by STAR Collaboration, L. Adamczyk, J. R. Adams +343 · 1 citation
Physics and Astronomy · #hep-ex #hep-ph #nucl-ex #nucl-th
paper · pdf · doi:10.1016/j.physletb.2018.07.066
published as Phys. Lett. B 785, 551 (2018) · 12 pages, 11 figures
arxiv created 2018/09/17 · arxiv updated 2018/09/18
Fluctuations of conserved quantities such as baryon number, charge, and strangeness are sensitive to the correlation length of the hot and dense matter created in relativistic heavy-ion collisions and can be used to search for the QCD critical point. We report the first measurements of the moments of net-kaon multiplicity distributions in Au+Au collisions at √s\rm NN = 7.7, 11.5, 14.5, 19.6, 27, 39, 62.4, and 200 GeV. The collision centrality and energy dependence of the mean (M), variance (σ2), skewness (S), and kurtosis (κ) for net-kaon multiplicity distributions as well as the ratio σ2/M and the products Sσ and κσ2 are presented. Comparisons are made with Poisson and negative binomial baseline calculations as well as with UrQMD, a transport model (UrQMD) that does not include effects from the QCD critical point. Within current uncertainties, the net-kaon cumulant ratios appear to be monotonic as a function of collision energy.